Dying to Tell (9 page)

"Well, she doesn't live far away, does she?"

"No, but.. ." Another pause. "It's good of you too, doing all this for us."

"It's not so much."

"We're relying on you, you know." (People doing that had to be either mad or desperate. I suppose the Alders counted as both.)

"I'll see what I can come up with, Win. Let's talk tomorrow. I've got to go now. "Bye."

"They're a weird lot, then, are they, Rupe's family?" Echo put the question to me a few hours later, as we toyed with some appetizers in Kennington's foremost Portuguese dining establishment.

"Pretty dysfunctional, yeh."

They sound like Stella Gibbons dreamed them up."

"Who?"

"She wrote Cold Comfort Farm."

"Oh, yeh. Right. Well, cold comfort's about all they're going to get from me, far as I can see."

"Come on. You haven't done that badly." She gave me a sparkly smile, though it failed to out-sparkle the spangles on her eye-shimmying orange top. "You've surprised me with what you've found out already."

"Have I?"

"Aluminium smuggling. Great Train Robbers. I had no idea I was lodging with such a man of mystery."

"It's not exactly smuggling." (I was beginning to wonder if confiding in Echo had been a good idea. But after a couple of drinks I was bound to confide in someone and Echo had no axe to grind that I knew of.) "As for Prettyman and this Townley bloke .. ." I shrugged. "I just don't get it."

"Perhaps Mr. Hashimoto will tie it all together."

"Maybe. But if he doesn't.. ."

"What?"

That'll be the end of the road. There's nothing else I can do."

"You'll just give up?"

"I won't have any choice."

"Bloody hell." She looked genuinely disappointed. "I thought you meant to go on and on until you dug out the truth."

"You've got me all wrong, Echo. I'm a natural quitter."

"Oh yeh?" Her gaze narrowed. "I'm not so sure."

"Just you wait and see. Meanwhile .. ." I took a big swallow of vinho verde. "Why don't you tell me how you got a name like Echo?"

She shook her head. "Can't do that, I'm afraid."

"Why not?"

"A girl has to have a few secrets." She teased me with a grin. "But don't worry. I haven't got any that are half as exotic as Rupe's."

"Now it's my turn not to be sure."

"Think about something else, then." Her grin faded away. "What am I supposed to do if you draw a blank?"

"How d'you mean?"

"Well, should I move out of Hardrada Road? Being lodger to an international commodities crook could be bad for my health."

"I don't think you're in any danger, Echo." (Could I honestly say that? Rupe had waded into some pretty murky waters waters that might one day come lapping at our feet.)

"It'd be sensible to move on, though, wouldn't it?"

"Might be, I suppose."

"I reckon I will. If you pack up and go home to Somerset. Has to be the safest option." Her face crumpled into a frown. "And then ..."

"What?"

"Well.. ." She gazed soulfully into her wine. "Rupe really will be lost then, won't he?"

CHAPTER SIX

Echo had set off for the sorting office by the time I surfaced the following morning. Over a cobbled-together breakfast, I computed that to be at the Hilton at ten I'd need to be on the bus by half nine. According to Echo, the post was sure to have been delivered to Hardrada Road by then, but her confidence on the point didn't seem to square up to reality. Regular squints out of the window revealed no approaching postie as nine o'clock came and went. Eventually, just as I was about to make a move for the bus stop, along came Echo's tardy colleague, the result being that I had to take Dad's letter with me and start sifting through the contents on the top deck of the number 36 as it lumbered towards Hyde Park Corner.

Dad had done a thorough job with the cuttings, as I might have expected a clutch of articles reporting sudden farm-related deaths and subsequent inquests along with a couple of feature pieces pondering the meaning of so many fatalities crammed into the summer and autumn of 1963.

The exact number had itself been a cause of dispute. Four or five, according to whether you included Reginald Gorton, owner of a peat-digging business near Shapwick, who'd died of a heart attack early in September. If you were looking for jinxes, I supposed you did. The sequence had started at the end of July, with Albert Crick falling off a barn roof. Then Peter Dalton, none other, had been found dead of gunshot wounds at Wilderness Farm, near Ashcott. The date: Monday 19 August. Within a fortnight of the Great Train Robbery on Thursday 8 August, just as Bill Prettyman had said.

The Central Somerset Gazette wasn't to know of a connection if there really was one with big-time crime in Buckinghamshire, of course. They said Dalton had inherited Wilderness Farm from his father the year before and was thought by neighbouring farmers to be struggling to make a go of it. Shotgun suicide was lightly implied. The inquest a month later had gone along with that, despite what the coroner had called 'minor inconsistencies in the disposition of the deceased and the weapon'. What did that mean? The Gazette wasn't in the business of asking.

As to the discovery of Dalton's body, there was Howard's name in black and white. Howard Alder, 15, of Penfrith, Street, was cycling along a footpath that passes through the yard of Wilderness Farm when he noticed a figure lying in the doorway of the milking shed. There was nothing about just how grisly this discovery must have been. Nor any mention of Howard at the inquest. Just as there'd never been a whisper of the event in all the years I'd known Howard through Rupe. Very strange.

And it got stranger. Once you bought into Gorton being part of a sequence, that made three deaths within six weeks. This point only seemed to be seriously seized on after a fourth death, late in October. Andrew Moore, son of the owner of Mereleaze Farm, near Othery, had been knocked off his motorbike by a lorry and killed in an accident at the A391 A361 junction on the afternoon of Monday 28 October. It was the day after the clocks had gone back for winter. The early dusk was held partly to blame. But with Hallowe'en in the offing, some ghoulish theories had started doing the rounds. Dad had copied a few letters to the editor for me. There may be no basis to the wilder talk of a curse on our farming community, but it is difficult to see so many deaths as coincidental that sort of thing.

The fifth and evidently final death was of George Alder himself, on Sunday 17 November. Mr. Alder went out early in the morning, reported the Gazette later in the week. When he did not return by mid-afternoon, his family grew concerned. His 15-year-old son, Howard, cycled to Cow Bridge and began looking for him along the banks of the Brue, where Mr. Alder had taken to walking of late. Howard eventually found his father's body, tangled in reeds, a short distance west of the bridge. Mr. Alder is believed to have drowned.

It was strange stuff to read. The Gazette had failed to point out that Howard now figured in two of the clutch of deaths. Perhaps they'd refrained out of sensitivity. Others must have commented on it. And why had George taken to walking by the Brue of late? No suggestions. Not even a hint. What about his wife's pregnancy? There was enough tragedy without dwelling on that, apparently. It wasn't mentioned. The inquest, just before Christmas, brought in a verdict of accidental death. The coroner emphasized that suggestions of a link with other deaths in the area were 'as absurd as they are unfeeling'. Bet that put a stop to them.

Cow Bridge, on a November afternoon, Wearyall Hill and the Tor darkening to the north while the poplars along Street Drove stood sentinel to the south, made a spooky setting for a haunting discovery. There'd have been much less traffic on the Glastonbury to Butleigh road back then. It could have been well nigh silent as Howard picked his way along the bank, peering into the cold grey water until he saw.. .

I was born five days later, at Butleigh Cottage Hospital. And Rupe was born the following spring. We began just as all that ended. But what was it that ended? Forget a curse on the land. Howard was the connection the coroner reckoned it was absurd and unfeeling to try to make. Dalton and his own father. Plus Townley. Two dead bodies and a photograph. What did it mean? What did it amount to then and now? I hadn't a clue. Or rather I had several. But they were all far too cryptic for me.

Most cryptic of all was Howard himself. He'd never seemed the secretive type. In fact, he'd never struck me as capable of concealing anything. Now I knew better. He'd concealed plenty. OK, that could have been because it was all too traumatic to call to mind. But then nobody had ever mentioned that he'd been traumatized. Rupe had always told me Howard was weak-minded from birth. But how would Rupe know? For the first twenty years of Howard's life the only surviving first-hand informants were Win and Mil. They were well aware of how and when his decline set in. Finding his father's dead body floating in the Brue must have speeded him down the slope. But they'd never breathed a word about that. And how had the scene of that death somehow drifted five miles south to the Sedgemoor Drain?

It was a question that bothered Dad as well as me, as he admitted in a note attached to the cuttings.

I could swear we had that story about the Sedgemoor Drain from the Alders themselves. Why would they make something like that up, do you suppose? Howard certainly must have had a bad time of it that summer and autumn. But I checked with your mother and she is fairly certain Mavis Alder never mentioned those experiences as a reason for Howard's feeble-mindedness. I do not recall it cropping up while he was at Clarks either. I suppose no one was likely to remember if no one reminded them. The jinx was a bit of a nine days' wonder. I had forgotten it almost completely. Dalton's death reads oddly to me. Does it to you? "Inconsistencies in the disposition of the deceased and the weapon'. What was the coroner getting at? Something other than suicide? The police officer mentioned in a couple of the reports Inspector Forrester is actually Don Forrester, who worked for Clarks for a few years after he retired from the force. (Howard had left by then.) I see Don quite often, pushing a trolley around Tesco. He must be eighty-odd now, but looks pretty spry. Do you want me to ask him about the deaths Dalton in particular? It might lead nowhere, of course. Who can say? Let me know. I have nothing better to do. And it is interesting, I have to admit.

My mind was still turning all this over as I hurried through the subway under Hyde Park Corner and up Park Lane to the Hilton. I most certainly did want Dad to put a few questions to Don Forrester. Did he think Dalton had actually been murdered, for instance? If so, who by? The name of Stephen Townley had never made it into the columns of the Central Somerset Gazette. But perhaps it should have done. And perhaps it still might.

It was a few minutes to ten as I entered the hotel and headed across the marbled wastes of the lobby towards the reception desk. Technically, I was early. But not too early for Mr. Hashimoto. A figure bobbed into my path short, slimly built and grey-suited. I found myself looking into a calm, sad-eyed Japanese face beneath a school boyish mop of silver-shot black hair, gold-rimmed specs glinting in the Hilton spotlights. "Mr. Bradley?" he asked, with that slight but distinctive oriental vagueness around the Rs. "I am Kiyofumi Hashimoto."

"Er .. . Pleased to meet you." We shook hands. There was a hint of a bow on Hashimoto's part. "How did you know who I was?"

"It was obvious, Mr. Bradley. Believe me."

"Right. Is that good news or bad, I wonder? Being obvious, I mean."

"It is a fact. That is all."

"Facts? Well, I could use a few of those."

"Me too." (Was he being ironic? I couldn't tell. What's more, with Kiyofumi Hashimoto, it was pretty obvious you'd never be able to tell.)

"I'm a friend of Rupe Alder, Mr. Hashimoto. If you can help me find him .. ."

That is what you are trying to do?"

"Yeh. His family are worried about him. He's, er .. ."

"Disappeared." Hashimoto nodded. "I am looking for him also. Perhaps we can help each other."

"Maybe we can."

"Shall we take a stroll in the park? It will be ... pleas anter ... to talk there."

The morning was too cool and damp by my reckoning for strolling, even if strolling in parks had been a habit of mine, which it wasn't. Hashimoto didn't exactly seem the outdoor type either, hoisting a vast Hilton golfing brolly against the drizzle and stepping carefully through the muddy drifts of leaves in his gleaming lounge-lizard shoes.

"Are you in shipping, Mr. Hashimoto?" I asked, as we wandered vaguely west towards the Serpentine.

"No. Microprocessors. My concern to find Rupe has nothing to do with business."

"It hasn't?"

"Nothing at all. The aluminium is ... someone else's problem."

"You know about the aluminium?"

"I have found out about it since coming to London. But it is ... ancillary ... to my difficulties."

"Ancillary?"

"Marginal. Almost irrelevant. You see..." He glanced round at me, squinting slightly through his glasses. "You are a good friend of Rupe, Mr. Bradley?"

"Lifelong."

"Then we should not be so formal. I shall call you Lance. OK?"

"Fine by me."

"And you should call me Kiyofumi."

"Right. Kiyofumi. You, er, met Rupe in Tokyo?"

"Yes."

"How did that happen?"

"My niece became his girlfriend. I met Rupe at my sister's home two or three times last summer."

"Your niece ..."

"Haruko. A good girl."

"I'm sure she is. So, she and Rupe ..."

"A typhoon romance." Hashimoto smiled. "Her mother was very pleased."

"Were you?"

"Certainly. Rupe seemed .. ." He shrugged. "Kind. Charming. Easy to like." (That description fitted Rupe, all right. Typhoon romancer was a bit harder to get used to, though. Still, if he was going to fall for someone, I supposed it would be headlong.)

"What did Haruko's father think?"

"Her father is not with us, Lance." (Did that mean dead? I hadn't the nerve to ask.) That is why I have to be ... more than an uncle to her."